Individual ownership of discreet areas of land has been a fundamental desire of many human beings expressing their nature as both an acquisitive and social animal.
The simplest form of ownership is a land title granted by the state that designates the boundaries of the land, the owner and the entitlement that the owner has as owner.
As world population numbers and densities increase, there is a continuous demand for larger numbers of land titles to be issued. The process of dividing a large area of land into smaller areas is generally referred to as sub-division.
In order to make use of any land area either as a single individual, as a family, or as a social or enterprise group, it is necessary to gain access to it in some way, and to gain access to essential services that make habitation of the land environmentally, commercially, and humanly sustainable.
This access is normally achieved by incorporating public road, and service distribution systems within the land sub-divisions, or legalizing some entitlement which allows shared access with another land owner or owners.
The area occupied by the road access system is essentially shared land owned by a group, normally the state who also control the limits and rules associated with the granting of new land titles.
The whole process is often referred to as town planning. The reasons for a landowner to allow or encourage his land to be sub-divided are almost always associated with profit. A large plot of land is normally less valuable than that same plot divided into smaller saleable sections provided there is access to each individual parcel or lot.
The basic technique for sub-dividing land starts with the arrangement of the access system. Often the road system is already in place and the sub-division is simply a process cutting the land into narrower plots that continue to share the same (public) road. However, sometimes it is necessary to provide new roads entering the land to be sub-divided. These roads are usually arranged according to some preconceived notion of how the land will then be sub-divided, and they determine to a great extent the appearance of the final sub-division.
It is the normal practice when creating a sub-division to create these roads first in a grid or other pattern, and to then divide the land so that each block has access to them. An alternate process involves the creation of groups of land with a perimeter of access way attached to it that can be arranged in a pattern on the site.
The land occupied by roads is essentially not “saleable”, and so it is important to reduce the land occupied by such roads.
There are many ways of doing this including the adoption of very narrow long blocks, the use of narrow roads, management of the hierarchy of access ways to allow them to be narrower, shared access, or the adoption of new forms of land title such as group or strata title.
All of these operate on an outside-in approach, where access ways are created first with the sub-division working away from them or the sub-division is created within a perimeter of access or service corridors. This approach tends to cause the access ways to dominate the design and particularly in dense sub-divisions when groups of buildings are attached to each other, cause the area occupied by roads to be large when compared to the land they give access to. This approach also tends to force the access ways to define the major social aspects of the development or the way in which the occupiers of the land will react with each other once the land is occupied. This forcing is at its most obvious when the lots are small, and is typical of very dense landed property developments such as row or terrace housing.
This forcing of social outcome is generally considered to be a negative by many sociologists and town planners. Most sociologists believe that it is important for human beings to have distinct private, or their own family space, semi-private, or space in which they mix with people they are familiar with and public, or space in which they mix with strangers. It is important that private space is buffered by a layer of semi-private space. Many criminologists also agree that this sort of arrangement reduces crime rates and improves the security of residential communities.
Previous attempts to optimize land utilization in a sub-division project whilst retaining some sense of aesthetics generally have related to schemes for land sub-division, with or without schemes for arrangement of building structures on sub-divided plots. Other attempts at optimization of land usage have related to specific structural configurations of buildings to optimize occupant amenity in a high density environment.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,623,296 describes a multistorey structure to accommodate trailer homes and the like in a more efficient and aesthetically pleasing manner.
A physical arrangement of pre-constructed building modules described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,629,983 is said to achieve efficiency of construction and economy of land use. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 3,678,639 describes a mobile home arrangement which enables the configuration of two or more mobile homes to give the appearance of a single conventional dwelling.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,720,023 describes a complex array of patio houses arranged in such a way as to reduce building costs whilst maximizing land utilization.
Other techniques for maximizing land utilization in a residential sub-division utilize common walls between adjacent building structures or rigidly proscribed layouts of building structures, land plot shapes and access roadways. Examples of sub-divisions utilizing common walls between adjacent structures are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,732,649, 3,874,137, 3,996,709, 4,325,205 and 4,920,711.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,575,977, 4,679,363, 4,852,213, 5,671,570, 5,761,857 and 6,470,633 each deal with residential land sub-division on a “micro” scale but the inflexibility of the “micro” sub-divisional regions or units, when applied on a “macro” scale do not achieve the combination of flexible land use optimization and general amenity as provided with the present invention.
Terrace or row house sub-division represents the densest form of landed property development currently available. However, in a row or terrace house development there is almost no semi-private space. Houses face directly onto a major street with only a small exposed yard separating them from it. The streets are through streets generally carrying traffic from a large radius around any individuals home. They are often used as alternative access to commuters passing through the area.
In order to overcome these undesirable outcomes, new forms of title have been created for residential, and to a limited extent, commercial developments.
Often called “group title” or “cluster housing” these allow for the development of larger pieces of land on which a cluster of dwellings or other buildings are built, normally attached to each other. The ownership of the land is shared while often the buildings are owned by individual titles. The social outcome is considered by many to be better, while the ownership or tenure is no doubt less secure, and potentially less valuable.
Generally speaking, housing units that sit on their own plots of land are called landed property. Such housing units may be detached, as in the bungalow, or linked. Common types of linked housing units are the semi-detached house, the terrace house and the cluster house, which comprises four or more housing units in one block.
In a conventional repetitive housing development, housing units are repeated along a road, resulting in rows or blocks of houses called row housing. In many countries, government authorities such as Local Governments, State and Federal Town and Regional Planning Departments, the Construction Industry Development Board and the Fire and Rescue Departments have strict guidelines on the design of repetitive housing units on landed property, particularly as they relate to row housing. In general, the most efficient way to put as many housing units on each acre of land is by arranging row housing orthogonally in a regular grid plan.
Given land boundaries that form irregular shapes and geographical features that form naturally, the rigid orthogonal grid arrangement may not be suitable. Moreover, in order to achieve more interesting designs, the orthogonal grid may be adjusted by curving or bending the roads and rows of houses to follow the natural contours and boundaries. Alternatively, the orthogonal grid may be replaced by a radial grid to achieve more interesting forms or the dimensions of the basic housing unit or row of units may be altered to better fit the land. Often, multiple grids are employed within a housing site and consequently various row housing layout patterns result from prior art housing sub-division methods.
However, as a general rule, it is safe to conclude that the more irregular, the more organic the plan of a row housing layout, the less efficient becomes the layout in terms of land usage.
Where cost and land-use efficiency is a priority, the social features of row housing suffer. In row housing estates, the road is the public space that fronts each house unit. That road is designed for the car rather than the pedestrian rendering it less suitable for social interaction, and unsuitable as a play area for smaller children. That road is also a public domain, accessible not only to the residents and their guests, but also to uninvited strangers and potential criminals. The longer and the more interconnected the roads, inviting faster traffic speeds and potential criminals, the more unsafe is the public space just outside the house. There may be public amenities like playgrounds and green spaces in a housing estate, but these may be streets away, unsuitable for smaller children to go to their own, and being public areas, subject to vandalism and neglect.
Poor housing forms can contribute to social dysfunction. Social and human factors play the major role in creating good neighbourhoods but housing design too can play a role. Studies of prior art housing communities have focussed on three important issues:                i) The influence of the built environment on the level of social interaction.        ii) The design features of housing that can reduce the incidence of crime.        iii) The role and effect of the environment outside the home on the preschool child.        
Jan Gehl, “Life Between Buildings” (1971), presented empirical evidence that correlated housing design features which inhibited or promoted social interaction. Oscar Newman, an architect, modified the buildings of public housing in New York, housing that could be described as crime-ridden slums. He found that certain design features successfully reduced crime. His design strategy described in his book “Defensible Space” (1972) was to modify the public spaces around the houses that are “no man's land”, such that the residents are given ownership of these “shared” spaces. Charles Mercer, “Living in Cities” (1975), citing the work of Lee Rainwater (1966) and John & Elizabeth Newson (1968) posited that play is an important arena for learning for the child; that growing up can be seen as a process, where the child becomes more and more independent of the parent, exploring first the spaces around the mother, other rooms in the house, the front yard, and so on. In this work, he considered that the opportunity for exploring new environment is best presented in small discreet steps so that the child can explore them at his own pace.
A problem with a typical urban or suburban situation is that the process of exploring new territory independent of the parent stops at the front gate. Beyond that is not considered safe. When a child is finally old enough to go out unaccompanied by an adult, he or she is disadvantaged compared to a child that could explore bit by bit the neighbourhood around the home. This suggests that the space outside the home should be made conducive to the growing up process. It should be safe for smaller children with ample play and civic amenities. Play areas with parks or sports fields some minutes away from the home do not serve this function.
It is possible when designing row housing to design a road network in such a way as to create more exclusive, semi-private, pedestrian friendly zones by creating looping roads, cul-de-sacs and placing green spaces in front of each house but this will reduce the land-use efficiency, increase the cost of the development and render it either unaffordable to the public, or commercially unfeasible. Similarly, where cost is a priority, the aesthetic features of the row housing suffer because land-use efficiency requires:
rectangular plots of land
narrow frontages, the narrower the better
regular facade lines, the straighter the better.
Generally speaking, the more irregular the shape of the housing unit, the wider its frontage, the more articulated the facade, the more expensive becomes the development cost.
In the particular case of the terrace house, which is the most land-efficient, and hence the most common type of row housing, the long block of terrace houses does not fit well on naturally sloping or undulating sites. It is cheaper to excavate hills, and fill valleys and streams to provide relatively flat platforms for the long blocks. Extensive earthworks is a cheaper alternative than the extra construction cost incurred when level changes are introduced within the block. Environmentally, this is a particularly grave disadvantage of row terrace housing as the natural terrain and environment of hills and valleys is flattened and natural steams replaced with concrete drains.
It is an aim of the invention to overcome or alleviate at least some of the disadvantages of prior art methods for sub-division of land.
It would be desirable to provide a novel design method of planning repetitive housing resulting in novel types of housing units and layout that can overcome the social, aesthetic and environmental shortcomings of row housing but which meets the test of commercial viability, in keeping down the cost of land, infrastructure and earthworks and render the new types of houses affordable. In particular, it would be desirable to find a viable alternative to the terrace house as the most cost efficient building type for landed property development.
It would be desirable also to improve the pattern of roads and public spaces that serve housing units and to create better neighbourhoods which increase the value of a housing development. At the same time it would be most desirable to achieve better land use efficiency and to reduce infrastructure costs.